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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Deleuze, politics, life « Previous | |Next »
June 20, 2007

In his book Deleuze, Marx, and Politics, Nicholas Thoburn says:

At one level, an initial presentation of Deleuze's politics is a relatively simple task. Deleuze and Guattari are self-proclaimed 'political' thinkers. Indeed, politics is central enough to their understanding of the formation of life that they can write that 'politics precedes being' (ATP: 203). Deleuze's politics, like indeed all his and Guattari's concepts and categories, is closely related to his Spinozist and Nietzschean materialism, with its conception of the world as an ever-changing and intricately related monstrous collection of forces and arrangements that is always constituting modes of existence at the same time as it destroys them. Such a materialism conceives the world as not only without finitude, but also without delineated subjects or objects; let us call them 'things'.11 Of course, this is not a refutation of the existence of things, but it is a refusal to present them in any ontological or epistemological primacy. There are things, but only as they are constituted in particular, varied, and mutable relations of force.

Thoburn adds that if the world is at base a primary flux of matter without form or constant, then things are always a temporary product of a channelling of this flux in what Deleuze and Guattari call 'assemblages' or 'arrangements' . Nietzsche calls this channelling a process of 'interpretation': the process whereby matter is cut and assembled by a particular series of forces .

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:03 AM |